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IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) has offered Fibre Channel Storage Virtualization since June 2003. Two SVC nodes communicate with each other via fibre channel to form a high availability I/O group. They then communicate with the storage that they virtualize via Fibre Channel and with the hosts they serve that virtual storage to, via Fibre Channel. When IBM added real-time (metro mirror) and... [More]

IBM has today announced a whole swag of planned new features across the entire IBM Storage product line. You can read the announcement letter here and I have also dropped the text at the bottom of this blog post (to save you clicking on the link). It's a very impressive list, but to hone in on a few of the more exciting offerings: IBM Easy Tier will be enhanced to cache hot data in SSD storage... [More]

One common question that I hear on a regular basis regards the availability of an SRA for VMware SRM 5.0 when using Storwize V7000 or IBM SVC running V6.3 firmware. This combination is currently unsupported as per the alert found here . The good news is that there are now IBM SRAs available for clients running SRM in combination with V6.3 firmware. While this combination is still not listed... [More]

It is ironic that only days after I wrote that 497 is the IT number of the beast , I learn that Linux has another unfortunate number: 208. The reason for this is a defect in the internal Linux kernel used in recent firmware levels of SVC, Storwize V7000 and Storwize V7000 Unified nodes. This defect will cause each node to reboot after 208 days of uptime. This issue exists in unfixed versions... [More]

I always laugh when people say to me: I wouldn't know what to blog about! When you work in pre-sales support, you constantly get asked questions and each one of them could be the subject of a new blog post. Right now the most common question I am getting is: I am implementing VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) . One of the components I need are vendor specific Site Recovery Agents (SRA).... [More]

Many years ago I picked up a book that literally blew my mind. It was the Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll and it's a genuine classic, a true tale of hackers and how one was tracked down in the very early days of the internet. Now the story is about events in 1986, so it captures the state of technology at the time (which rather dates the book), but wow, what a great story. So why mention the... [More]

When IBM brought out the SAN Volume Controller (SVC) in 2003, the goal was clear: support as many storage vendors and products as possible. Since then IBM has put a huge ongoing effort into interoperation testing, which has allowed them to continue expanding the SVC support matrix, making it one of the most comprehensive in the industry. When the Storwize V7000 was released in 2010 it was able... [More]

I have updated my IBM Storage WWPN Determination Guide to version 6.5. You can find the updated guide on IBM Techdocs here . The main change is that new DS8800s are now presenting slightly different WWPNs, so I added three new pages to describe the changes. If this guide is new to you, its purpose it to let you take a WWPN and decode it so you can work out not only which type of storage that WWPN... [More]

Here are two common statement I often hear from clients: I don't just want SAS drives, I also want SATA drives. SATA drives are cheaper than SAS drives. Nearline SAS drives are just SATA drives with some sort of converter on them. So is this right? Is this the actual situation? First up, if your storage uses a SAS based controller with a SAS backplane, then normally you can plug SAS drives into... [More]

I love USB keys, I love free ones, conferences give away ones and ones shaped like lego blocks. The exciting thing (for me) is that if you buy a Storwize V7000, you also get a USB key: A key which has two fundamental purposes: It's used to make installation very quick and easy (which it does very well!). It's used to reset the superuser password (in case you forget what it is) or to set the... [More]